09-08-2025
Veteran skier not sloping off
Neil Harrap's love of Coronet Peak's still undimmed in his 50th season. PHOTO: SUPPLIED
An 82-year-old Wellingtonian now in his 50th season skiing Queenstown's Coronet Peak has a favourite saying: "You don't give up skiing when you get old, you get old when you give up skiing."
Neil Harrap, who's also been a voluntary ambassador on the slopes for some 18 years, says there are people who have skied more years than him, "but they're not up there every day".
Or almost every day.
Harrap, who rents a home, normally at nearby Arthurs Point, each winter, comes down within a day or two of opening day and stays all season.
Add in a month to six weeks every year at Snowbird, Utah, in the United States, where he's gone for 45 years, and he skis about 120 days a year.
Oddly, he didn't even learn to ski till he was 33.
"I wasn't into sports at all, and a friend talked me into coming down, and I thought, 'yeah, it sounds like a plan', and gave it a shot and just loved it from day one."
Explaining the infatuation, "I was just captured by the feeling of having wings on my feet, and you can do things on skis you can't do in real life — it's like magic, it's just incredible".
Harrap — who also got his ski instructor certification on Coronet in 1980 — says before snowmaking the season started about mid-July, "so they've got an extra month which is great".
"And they've opened up skiing to a lot more people, it was pretty much a male-dominated sport in the 1970s."
At that time, too, "it was pretty backward and some of the maintenance was pretty shoddy, but today it's a world-class operation, and I don't say that to please [skifield boss] Nigel [Kerr]".
Coronet's always his favourite local field — "it's got fantastic terrain, you know [ski/snowboarding film-maker] Warren Miller described it as a giant snowboard park, which is kind of what it is".
He shows guests around the skifield about once a week in his ambassador role — "I've asked for twice a week but I only get once a week most weeks".
The other week he took a group of four who, with the peak almost empty, only wanted to go fast.
"We really set the dogs loose, going as fast as I think I've skied up there."
Hardly the sign of someone slowing down just 'cos he's over 80.
